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Is there some technical reason or is this just sour apples from ALSA in revenge for no docs for so very long?

I think because the demand isn't that great for it. With the recent fiasco's that creative has pulled off, the priority for support on the X-Fi I would imagine is pretty low. There is however greater demand for SoC audio support and for alternative chipsets such as the popular Cmedia 8788 and Asus chipsets (rebranded Cmedia).

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Unfortunately, the audio situation on Linux is awful. ALSA is a bunch of crap, the driver quality varies extremely and the new layers and layers on top of it, like pulseaudio, don't make it any better. It's quite ridiculous that it's still hit-and-miss when you want to play multiple audio streams at the same time.

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No demand for X-Fi support? Maybe people are just sick and tired of waiting and lack of any response. Many people have also moved onto different soundcards as a result.

James Courtier-Dutton doesn't care and just brushes everyone off the moment they even mention the word "X-Fi". He is the one with the datasheet, and since this datasheet is under NDA, he's the only one that apparently can code this driver.

I can tell you there is (or was) more demand for X-Fi support than stupid System on a chip support that nobody, you or me, will care about probably ever. As you can see I am rather disappointed by the lack of support, waited for years, and now since moved to an external DAC, and there are many people like me who no longer really care about support anymore as its been too long already and have bought something else. Sure hardware mixing and resampling would be great, but at this point its easier to just stick with an Audigy 4 for that. Its like waiting for UT3, there are few that actually give a crap anymore as most have just moved onto other things, as well as decline in popularity of the game as a whole.

So ALSA has the specs, and they don't really care about coding the driver in a timely fashion at this point in time it seems. Nobody bothered porting the OSS code over to ALSA as the driver is a piece of crap, no hardware mixing, no resampling, etc. ALSA is also crap as anyone thats never coded for ALSA before wont ever dare even as much touch the code as its a complete nightmare to develop for. Not to mention ALSA completely goes against the openness and portability of open source as its only for Linux.

Lack of proper sound support is one of the major downfalls of Linux as a whole. Sure many cards are supported, but try naming a single card that has *complete* support that was made in this decade, I dare ya.

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What sound chip do the SoCs use? Something derived from an old chip which they already have working drivers for?

SoC is getting more popular amongst the geekier crowds, and is probably worth a lot more for Linux longterm as it is Linux on SoC is a good choice for thin client set-ups, light-weight desktop set-ups, basically any set-up that isn't trying to do heavy computing which is everything except the workstations and game boxes.

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What sound chip do the SoCs use? Something derived from an old chip which they already have working drivers for?

SoC is getting more popular amongst the geekier crowds, and is probably worth a lot more for Linux longterm as it is Linux on SoC is a good choice for thin client set-ups, light-weight desktop set-ups, basically any set-up that isn't trying to do heavy computing which is everything except the workstations and game boxes.

It would appear that development for 1.0.18 is still very heavily geared to ASoC. Don't expect any X-Fi support for this release either. I see they're finally adding proper support for jack sensing however, welcome to 2004 ALSA.